Guy Kovner, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
They say money doesn’t grow on trees, but a nearly 75,000-acre swath of redwood and fir forests blanketing the wildlands of Sonoma and Mendocino counties is generating millions of dollars as it contributes to California’s ambitious campaign to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
In a reversal of forest profiteering that dates back to the mid-1800s, the trees are making landowners money by staying upright and growing fast on damp coastal hills where vegetation thrives and few humans set foot.
The Conservation Fund, a Virginia-based nonprofit, has since 2008 sold more than $36 million worth of a new forest commodity called carbon credits, also known as carbon offsets, which represent 4 million metric tons of greenhouse gases sequestered, or stored, by forests that in turn must be sustained for 100 years.
The Conservation Fund’s forests are among the top two or three producers of forest-based carbon offsets in California’s carbon cap-and-trade program, said Chris Kelly, California program director for the group.
More than $2 million in credits have already sold for the former Preservation Ranch, a 19,645-acre property in northwestern Sonoma County that once was the focus of an intense environmental controversy.
Purchased by the fund for $24.5 million in public and private funding in 2013 — in the largest conservation deal by acreage in county history — the ranch, renamed Buckeye Forest, is forever protected against a future that once included a proposed 1,800 acre forest-to-vineyard conversion. Those plans aroused environmentalists’ anger and would have eliminated more than 300,000 trees.
Read more at: Under California cap-and-trade program, North Coast forests turn | The Press Democrat

In May, The Conservation Fund announced that it had bought nearly 20,000 acres of coastal redwood, Douglas fir, and oak woodlands, known as Preservation Ranch, in Sonoma County, in order to prevent the area from being turned into vineyards. The plan by the national environmental nonprofit is one the largest conservation efforts of its scale in the state. The Conservation Fund also intends to implement sustainable forestry practices at Preservation Ranch and use carbon credits from the state’s cap-and-trade program to help pay for the restoration of the forest, which was heavily damaged by decades of logging. If successful, the project could serve as model for sustainable forestry practices in California and throughout the nation. But it’s an ambitious project, and not without it’s share of challenges.

By Cathy Bussewitz, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
Dozens of environmental activists adorned with branches and dressed like fluffy redwood trees demonstrated outside the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday to protest a proposal to convert nearly 1,800 acres of coastal forests to vineyards.Photo Galleries
Preservation Ranch Protest
A man costumed as an eight-foot tall bottle of “Pinot Egrigio” labeled “Chainsaw Wine” wielded a fake chainsaw before the animated trees.
“It’s a Sonoma County vintage,” said Dave Jordan, volunteer with Friends of Gualala River, a group that carpooled down from Gualala to Santa Rosa to attend the meeting. “It’s not against wine. It’s not against vineyards. It’s about cutting down redwood forests to plant grapes.”
via Activists protest Preservation Ranch at Sonoma County Board of Supervisors meeting | PressDemocrat.com.

Brett Wilkison, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
CalPERS, the giant state workers pension fund, has ended several months of uncertainty by signaling to Sonoma County that it intends to move forward with a huge, controversial timber-to-vineyard conversion project near Annapolis.
Called Preservation Ranch, the project would clear up to 1,769 acres of forest for wine grapes on nearly 20,000 acres in northwestern Sonoma County.
via CalPERS vows to push giant Preservation Ranch vineyard project | PressDemocrat.com.